“This is their home.” Raúl’s voice boomed over the scraps of quarreling. “And my home.” The crowd turned toward Raúl. A small stone hit his chest, and he flinched. His eyes darted around the parking lot with a flicker of panic.
“Raúl’s got nothing to do with this.” Chester Talbot grabbed the arm of a twenty-something lobbing rocks.
“I have everything to do with this.” Raúl licked his dry lips and swallowed hard.
“Dad, don’t,” Daniela yelled as she pushed through the crowd.
“This is my home as much as it is anyone’s.” Raúl’s voice quivered. He drew in a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak.
“Dad,” Daniela called out.
Raúl caught Daniela’s eye and swallowed hard.
“You’re legal, Raúl.” Ryan, still in Garrett’s grip on the periphery of the crowd, slurred his words. “There’s a big difference.”
Cadie wedged her shoulders between strangers as she tried to get to Raúl before he spoke words he could never take back. She felt them expanding in his chest the way the truth about Juan was clawing its way up her own throat.
Inside the bar the crowd had felt thick and soupy with the accusations and economic angst of a small town coming undone at the seams. But as they regrouped on the street, the bodies numbered less than fifty. What had felt crowded and oppressive moments earlier looked sad and desperate under the open sky.
The law of entropy said the tangle of bodies should disperse in the open air, take up more space, and dissipate. But in the street, the residents of Maple Crest wound themselves into a tighter knot, with Raúl in the center.
The crew of construction workers from Massachusetts stood in the doorway of the bar, then went back inside, probably congratulating themselves on the chance to take over the abandoned pool tables, Cadie thought.
Ryan ducked and twisted out of Garrett’s grip. Garrett let him go without a fight.
“Everybody knows who they found in those woods,” another voice yelled at Raúl. “What were you and Hernández really fighting about that day?”
The accusation landed like a stone in Cadie’s gut. Raúl’s vulnerability splayed out in front of everyone. Truths unspoken sizzled in the air.
Daniela froze. The battle between her desire to run to Raúl and her fear of unmasking her family lay exposed in every tense muscle. She appeared paralyzed, trapped in the space between fear and action. Only her eyes moved.
If folks were this willing to blame Raúl now, how would they react when the ID was made public?
“We’re all feeling the drought and the foreclosures. All of us,” Raúl shouted. His fingers twitched as if he were squeezing the trigger on the Windex bottle he always carried in the store. Cadie moved around the outskirts of the crowd to get to Raúl from behind.
“We’ve got no problem with you, Raúl.” Ryan moved closer to Raúl.
“If you have a problem with my friends, you have a problem with me.” Raúl’s voice remained steady but his eyes skipped around the crowd nervously.
Tino put himself between Ryan and Raúl.
“You.” Ryan placed a palm on Tino’s chest and shoved him. “You, I do have a problem with.”
Tino pushed Ryan back and something snapped in the crowd. A roar rose up in front of Cadie, around her. She couldn’t see Daniela anymore. The hairs on Cadie’s neck pricked up with an icy feeling that what was about to happen could never be undone.
Ryan cocked his arm back and landed a sloppy fist on Tino’s cheek. Tino stumbled backward and Ryan hit him again. Tino leaned over and spit blood on the ground. Cadie pushed through unfamiliar shoulders, trying to get closer to Raúl as he coiled his arm back like the slow-motion draw of a bow and slammed his fist into Ryan’s jaw before Ryan had a chance to hit Tino a third time.
Flashing police lights disoriented Cadie as she pushed against the bodies separating her from Raúl. The pavement trembled, or maybe it was Cadie’s own knees shaking or the vibrations of Daniela’s fear rising up through the ground. Cadie lunged between Raúl and Ryan, who was already pumping his drunk fist and raising it in Raúl’s direction.
Cadie’s knuckles stung as her fist smashed into the side of Ryan’s face. He turned from Raúl to Cadie and stepped back, confused as to where the punch came from. The impact sent a sharp pain through Cadie’s shoulder and set her off-balance. She fell backward, and the side of her face slammed against a crumbling stone wall.
Raúl pulled Cadie up and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pinning her arms to her sides. Her back rose and fell against Raúl’s heaving chest.
“Enough,” he whispered.
A buzz of indistinguishable voices swelled into a single, desperate lament. Sweat, or maybe blood, dripped down the side of Cadie’s face.
She scanned the faces, searching for Garrett and Daniela. Instead, she found Clyde. The streetlight behind him cast shadows across the pasty, mottled skin hanging in pouches around his jowls.
Cadie tried to break free from Raúl’s restraint, but he clamped his arms tighter around her. Heat emanated from Raúl, a calm resolve that hushed the dagger-edged voices flying around her. Garrett grabbed Tino by the elbow and dragged him over to the edge of the crowd where Clyde stood, his eyes still fixed on Cadie. Watching the urgency in Garrett’s gait, the tenderness in the drape of his arm across Clyde’s shoulders, Cadie felt a disconnect. Garrett was protecting Clyde while Raúl stood vulnerable in front of the whole town. How did everyone not see the evil in Clyde’s face?
Garrett ushered Tino and Clyde into his police car, and drove off. Cadie slipped her hand into Raúl’s warm palm. He squeezed her hand until an officer dragged them both to the police station.
27
PRESENT DAY
Other than the trees, which wore prematurely crisp edges on their green leaves, everything in downtown Maple Crest was white. The post office, the police station, the library. Stark clapboard buildings, storefronts, and houses with saggy front porches.
The royal blue words spray-painted on the front of Garcia’s Hardware Store screamed against the starchy palette. Go Home. No one could look away, even if they didn’t want to read the words. The fuzzy edges of the imprecise lettering blurred into the flaking paint as if the pigment wanted to claw its way into the wood and infiltrate the framing.
Cadie walked past the darkened hardware store, fighting the urge to inspect the vandalism. Raúl should have been inside wiping down the previous day’s fingerprints from the front door. But no one had opened the store that morning. Several men who might have been on Raúl’s porch any other day gathered outside the post office.
Cadie smoothed the front of the linen skirt she had borrowed from her mother’s closet. She pushed open the heavy door to the middle school. Her footsteps echoed in the familiar hall where she once hid behind the lockers to spy on her seventh-grade crush.
“Cadie, it’s me.” Daniela had called her half an hour earlier as Cadie lay awake in bed. “Sal got suspended. The first week back at school and she gets herself fucking suspended. I can’t leave the hospital. And Mom’s still at the police station, trying to find out why they won’t release my dad.” Daniela’s voice slid up a register and cracked against the background noise of her rapid, urgent footsteps.
“I can get her.” Cadie fumbled to pull on her bra as she walked to her mother’s closet. She pumped her throbbing fist open and closed, stretching the bruise left from punching Ryan the night before.
“Thanks.” Daniela’s voice broke. “I should be the one picking her up. I’m working too much. What the hell am I doing, Cadie?”
“You’re taking care of your family. You’re working so you can build the life you want for Sal. I can get her. It’s not a problem,” Cadie said. In truth, she didn’t feel equipped to handle an angsty teenager who had gotten suspended, but she couldn’t help feeling pleased Daniela had asked her to help.
As a student, Cadie had admired the kids who dared to step out of line enough to get s
uspended. Cadie graduated high school having never even served detention. What had Sal done to get herself ejected?
“I have to be somewhere, but not until three. I could always take her with me if no one’s home yet,” Cadie said.
“Thanks. You can leave her with my parents. If they’re home.” Daniela spoke quietly now. “Text me and let me know what happens. I’m working a double. If my parents don’t come home—”
“I’ll hang on to Sal as long as you want. It’ll be fun. But why’s your dad still at the station?”
“I don’t know. Did he seem okay when you left last night?”
“Yeah. He was tired. We were all tired. I was with him the whole time, and then sometime after midnight they said the charges against me had been dropped. They sent me home.”
“Of course they did.” Daniela sighed loudly.
As she walked toward the middle school principal’s office, Cadie quickened her pace. She needed to meet the fire crew in four hours to tag trees. Best case, Raúl would be released in time to take Sal. Worst case, she would drag Sal with her to the work site. She straightened her back and opened the door to the vice principal’s office.
“This is totally unfair,” Sal said as soon as they exited the building. “I was exercising my constitutional right to free speech.”
“You don’t need to convince me. I’m just taking custody of you until your mom or grandparents get home.” Cadie tried to keep up with Sal’s quick strides. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Sal rolled her eyes.
“What’s on your leg?” Cadie pointed to a band of barbed wire with a fist rising up out of the barbs drawn in black ink on Sal’s thigh.
“Resistance art. I drew it.” The corners of Sal’s mouth twitched, even as she tried to act tough.
Sal halted at the edge of the sidewalk. Her indignance melted as she absorbed the message painted on her grandfather’s store.
Go Home.
“No, no, no!” Sal broke into a run. A pickup truck slammed on its brakes as she darted across the street without looking. Cadie waved an apology to the driver, who scowled at her and drove away. Cadie caught up with Sal on the porch of the store, staring at the graffiti. Cadie put a hesitant hand on Sal’s shoulder. Sal pushed her off.
“Why’s the store closed? Where are my grandparents? Where are they?” she shouted, looking up and down the street. Ryan and two other guys sitting in front of the fire station stood up from their lawn chairs to watch them. Ryan half waved. Cadie gave him the finger.
Sal looked at Cadie, then flipped him off too. “Fuck him,” Sal said. “Fuck all of them.”
“Your grandmother’s over at the police station now, trying to find out why they haven’t let him leave yet.”
“They let you leave last night.”
“I know. It’s not fair.”
“Figures. Look at you.” Sal kicked the white clapboard under the graffiti so hard Cadie worried she would hurt her foot. “And look at my grandfather.”
“Let’s clean this up before your grandparents see it. We can go back to my place and get some buckets and supplies.”
Cadie started down the steps, but Sal did not follow. “We can get stuff from inside the store. It’ll be faster.”
“It’s locked.”
“I know all their hiding spots. I’ll get the key.”
Cadie followed Sal around back to a wire cage stacked with refillable propane tanks.
Sal stuck her hand through the fence and reached behind a tank leaning against the back of the store. She triumphantly retrieved a fake rock with a key inside and unlocked the back door.
The air inside the store hung heavy with memories trapped in the accumulation of color, sound, humidity. Sensory echoes not tethered to a specific time or event. The same air, the same molecules she and Daniela had shared as kids still circulated in this room. She inhaled the myth of her own childhood. It tasted like turpentine.
Familiar fishing tackle lay under the glass counter, as if untouched for the past thirty years. Rows of spray paint lined up like tin soldiers. The vandals who sprayed the store had probably bought the paint here. Raúl probably knew them.
“Here, put it in your bag. Quick.” Daniela had tossed a can of gold spray paint to Cadie after they dropped their blueberries off at Angie’s one afternoon. “It matches your bike. We can patch the rust spots.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” Daniela had taken the can from Cadie’s hand and put it in Cadie’s backpack. “Who’s going to know?”
Nearly three decades later, as Cadie ran her finger along the dusty cans, she remembered the precise shade they stole. Summer sunset. Cadie picked up a matchbook from the basket by the counter and slipped it in her pocket.
Four dented metal lockers lined the back wall of the storeroom. Across the tops of the lockers, names spelled out in reflective mailbox letters read Raúl, Dolores, Agnes, and Fernando. One of those lockers had probably belonged Juan once.
Sal grabbed two mop buckets from the corner and took two new scrub brushes from a display aisle. Sal clenched her jaw as they filled the buckets with warm, soapy water and carried them outside.
Cadie and Sal scrubbed the graffiti while on full display for the entire town. Morning sun slid across the porch. Cadie worked on the front edge of the paint, racing the sun to remove the hateful words before the light hit them. She tried not to think about Clyde, if maybe he was watching them too.
They had scrubbed and smeared two letters each when heavy footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs around the side of the porch, out of their line of vision. Clutching her scrub brush as the only weapon within reach, Cadie leapt between Sal and the oncoming footsteps.
28
PRESENT DAY
“Grampa!” Sal barreled past Cadie to hug Raúl as he rounded the corner of the hardware store porch. “They let you go.”
His disheveled hair and wrinkled clothes made him appear older than he had the day before. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night.
“You’re okay?” Cadie said.
“I’m fine.” Raúl’s eyes flickered from Cadie’s defensive stance to her aggressively poised scrub brush. “Were you planning to scrub me to death?”
“I hadn’t really thought it through.” Cadie lowered the brush. “Who would do this? We should call the police.”
“We don’t need to call them. They can see it just fine.” Raúl looked down the street at the police station. He hitched his pants up and scuffed his shoe over the floorboards. “Besides, I don’t want to know who did it.”
Years of smiling had carved deep lines around Raúl’s eyes, leaving light tan lines that erupted from the corners when he did not smile. Cadie had never noticed them before because he almost always smiled. Standing there in front of the empty store, his eyes looked rounder and deeper, framed by a starburst of used-up smiles.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Raúl asked Sal.
“I had to pick her up early today. Daniela was at—”
“I got suspended,” Sal interrupted. “They were picking on this kid whose dad works at the farm. They kept calling him Pedro. Like every Latinx kid is named Pedro. So, I had to stop them, right?”
“You got in a fight?” Raúl said.
“Geez, no. Peaceful protest. You should read about Gandhi,” Sal said. “I told them his name was Jaime, so they should call him Jaime. Everybody deserves to be called by their name, right? But the teacher didn’t even do anything about it.”
“You got suspended for that?” Day-old sweat and stale coffee clung to the wrinkled clothes Raúl still wore from the night before.
“Well, I might have been standing on the teacher’s desk yelling about it.” Sal’s shoulders drooped. “And I might have refused to get down. I pulled a bunch of other kids up on the desk to protest with me. We broke the teacher’s paperweight and a mug.”
Raúl smiled down at his feet. “Maybe Cadie and I could
learn from your peaceful protests.
“Let me see your hand.” Raúl extended an open hand to Cadie.
Cadie placed her right hand on Raúl’s leathery palm. He examined her swollen knuckles. “Nothing looks broken. Does it hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Cadie bit on the inside of her cheek to hold back a smile. She’d never hit anyone in her entire life. Her hand didn’t hurt. It felt powerful.
Raúl stood with feet at shoulder width apart. He looked immovable, as if anchored in the granite ledge that held the entire town in place. Raúl was the rock, the boulder glaciers had deposited, a weathered stone riddled with fissures that refused to crack open.
“I hope the store never catches fire.” Raúl looked in the direction of the fire station. “I’m not sure they’d put it out.”
“Are we in trouble?” Sal said.
Raúl pulled Sal into his chest, smashing her cheek against the barrel of his torso. Sal closed her eyes. “I shouldn’t have hit anyone. Neither should Cadie. I’m proud you stood up for that boy, but we need to be careful.”
He released Sal from the bear hug. “Can you get three Cokes from the fridge?”
As she passed Cadie, Sal sprang up on her tiptoes to whisper in her ear. “I don’t care what he says. You and me, we’re badass.”
Sal let the door slam.
“Did they charge you?” Cadie said.
Raúl nodded. “You?”
“Apparently I don’t hit hard enough.”
Raúl touched Cadie’s bruised cheek where she’d hit her head on the pavement. “You don’t need to protect me.” He cupped her chin in his hand as if she were a child.
Sal came out with three old-fashioned glass Coke bottles. Raúl gripped the metal caps with the bottom of his T-shirt and twisted them open with long, slow hisses. The sharp bubbles burst against Cadie’s tongue. She longed to be a carefree child sipping a Coke while twirling on Angie’s bar stool.
Cars slowed as they passed the store. Drivers craned their necks to read the graffiti.
Waiting for the Night Song Page 22